Neni Panourgia

Chapter 4. 1945–1946: White Terror

I Want to Speak of the Great Silence

Following the Dekemvrianá and the retreat of ELAS from Athens, the vacuum in policing and surveillance in the country became acute. It was felt not only by the Greek government but also by the British, who, as Mazower notes, needed their troops elsewhere as quickly as possible (1997: 143). In haste they expanded the already formed National Guard (Ethnophylake), a body that had been set up in November 1944 and manned primarily by conscripts from the “class of 1936,” called to military service during the Metaxas dictatorship (and hence by definition anti-Communist and largely anti-Republican), a move that EAM considered to be explicitly aimed against the Resistance. Mazower further notes that the British officers were urged by Royalist officers to rearm the Tágmata (whose members, being collaborators, were being held in various prisons awaiting trial) and that the British police officers largely “sympathized with them who were 'out of a job through no fault of their own'” (1997: 143). During the Battle of Athens, former gendarmes, Tagmatasphalētes, and various collaborators were armed and incorporated in the National Guard. In February 1945 the political parties, ELAS, and EDES entered into negotiations under the auspices of the British in a southern seaside suburb of Athens, Várkiza, and arrived at what has come to be known as the Várkiza Agreement. The agreement demanded the complete disarmament of ELAS and all other paramilitary groups, amnesty for all political offences, a referendum on the question of the monarchy, and a general election as soon as possible. The KKE remained legal, and its leader, Nikolaos Zachariadis, who returned from Dachau in May 1945, said that the KKE's objective was now a “people's democracy,” to be achieved by peaceful means. There were dissenters, of course, like former ELAS leader Aris Velouchiotis. The KKE renounced Velouchiotis when he called on the veteran guerrillas to start a second struggle: shortly afterward he died in such a struggle. Of the demands of Várkiza (as the occasion has come to be known), the only one that was kept was the disarmament of ELAS, a condition that amounted to its termination.

The disarmament of ELAS made possible the unchecked persecution of all EAM/ELAS Resistance fighters, just as everyone had anticipated, despite the fact that the KKE was, nominally at least, a legal political party and despite the fact that the majority of EAM/ELAS fighters were not Communists. The amnesty was not comprehensive, especially since many of the actions by the Resistance during the German occupation were classified as criminal and therefore excluded from the amnesty.

During 1945 and 1946, the National Guard militias and paramilitaries killed about 1,190 pro-Communist and Leftist civilians, and tortured thousands of others. They released German collaborators from prisons, terrorized suspected Leftists and their families, and attacked entire villages that had helped the partisans during the occupation and the Resistance. According to the Right wing, they were retaliating for what they had suffered from ELAS during the German occupation.

The British, fearing that this indiscriminate terror would force the Left back underground and feeling an urgent need to get out of Greece, decided to rebuild the Greek gendarmerie and appointed Sir Charles Wickham to head this mission. Wickham was not an uncontroversial choice, as he was the founder and head of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, having cut his military teeth at the age of twenty during the last two years of the Boer War (he served there from 1899 to 1901). As Mazower notes about the role of policing in the defense of the empire, Wickham was one of the persons who traversed the empire, establishing the infrastructure needed for its salvation. After the Boer War and before being sent to Ireland, during the Russian Civil War Wickham was sent with the British Expeditionary Force to support the White Russians. In 1919 he was stationed in Ireland, and from 1922 to 1945 he was the head of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Wickham arrived in Greece in 1945, where he remained until 1952, when, as Mazower notes, he “traveled as an adviser to Palestine.” Wickham announced that he wanted to train the Greek police to be impartial and professional. During his seven-year tenure in Greece, Wickham failed to build the nonmilitarized, impartial, and professional police force that he had been asked to produce (and which, by all accounts, had been his elusive dream since the times of the Royal Ulster Constabulary). Hence, the White Terror continued in Greece and finally led many ex-ELAS members to form self-defense troops, without the approval of the KKE.

Mazower 1997: 250. Interestingly (or, rather curiously) Mazower does not discuss Wickham's involvement in the establishment of the Yáros concentration camp in 1947.

A line from Eleni Vakalo's poem “Threnody” (translated by Nikos Spanias, 1994: 160):

I want to speak of the great silence

That has no moon in its sky

That has no horses to send off the cortège

That has been forgotten by the river

I want to speak of our bitter

Unforgetting heart

They set Distomon on fire and put Morea to the knife

I want to speak of the destruction that crushes us

The dead one was brought to us

Wrapped in a red blanket

And a handful of jasmines

And the sorrows of night

They brought is closed shutters

A knife made of steel

To pierce the bark of trees

To make sky and sea

Incarnadine

This silence I love

This our heart I know

Close attention ought to be paid to the wording regarding the amnesty. The provision was made for amnesty for all political offenses. This wording allowed for a legal loophole that was utilized in the eventual criminalization of the Resistance.

Velouchiotis was either killed when he was surrounded by the TA or committed suicide so that he would not fall into their hands.

As we will see, the Yáros camp was established specifically for those indicted and sentenced for crimes punishable under criminal law and not for political reasons. This gesture of the state to categorize actions by the Resistance as criminal facilitated the legal prosecution (along with the persecution) of the Left and provided the legal framework for the establishment of the Yáros camp.